Linking *to* a high PR site?

Does this do anything for my page?

vich1

I read in the "26 steps to 15k a day" post that it is worthwhile to link *to* 1 or 2 high PR sites.

What is the logic behind that?

If this does indeed help, can the linked-to site be a directory listing (google directory for a particular topic, for example) instead of a specific website?

Thanks!

Vic

rfgdxm1

7:11 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Don't believe everything you read. There is certainly no evidence that this does any good for Google.

jeremy goodrich

7:20 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>>>>>There is certainly no evidence that this does any good for Google.

Yes, but from what I've seen on *my sites* it can do a world of good for your visitors.

It's not all about Google. And, for the sake of argument, you could draw a correlation between visitor satisfaction (the way I see it) and Google traffic, from a certain perspective...blog links, people spreading news of your great resource, etc.

Besides, if you link to 'some well known site' odds are - the person that sees you link will know the other site, so won't click, because right now, they are surfing *your site*.

Though, if they haven't seen the 'major site' before, they will likely remember that they found it through you so will have a more favorable impression of your site otherwise.

We don't know - and can't! - if / when Google might roll in their algo some sort of user satisfaction measure, like from the toolbar, bookmark actions, repeat visitation, time on site, etc.

Blanket assumptions are dangerous, rfdgxm1. I would have thought you might have noticed that by now.

Oaf357

There is still more to come. I'm waiting until another deep crawl/update or whatever Google is doing these days. But results will be posted.

Yidaki

7:29 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

hmm, rfgdxm1 ... beside the fact that it musn't even be a high pr site, i'd say that linking to a external page using good anchor text boost the linking - as a part of a mixture! My "favorite enemy", who has been booted a week ago, used to even link to adomain (without specifying a page) that returned a message like "not set up yet". He linked to it using about 50 images (1x1 pixel, what else?!) with alt text. The linked domain was keyword.widgetsdomain.com. The linking image's alt text was ... yah, keyword. Mixed with guestbook spamming using anchor text keyword (i knew, you'll love to talk about it again;)), he gained #1 for keyword. I guess another important factor for "his success" was the title of his (linking) page: keyword ... i checked his site carefully and found that combining all the above factors exploid somehow google's algo.

BigDave

Yes, but from what I've seen on *my sites* it can do a world of good for your visitors.

Sounds like a mighty good reason to me. The only reason I want to do good in google is to get more visitors. Visitors like useful sites.

I also look at it from tha standpoint of my links are my votes. I'm able to give some pretty good votes to some other sites that I think are very worthwhile. There are three small manufacturers of fairly innovative products that get the majority of the PR for their sites from links on my site.

My vote may not matter as much to the big sites that I link to, but then again, they might. Either way, they are helpful to my users.

rfgdxm1

7:42 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>Yes, but from what I've seen on *my sites* it can do a world of good for your visitors.

>It's not all about Google. And, for the sake of argument, you could draw a correlation between visitor satisfaction (the way I see it) and Google traffic, from a certain perspective...blog links, people spreading news of your great resource, etc.

And, I wrote "There is certainly no evidence that this does any good for Google." This was asked on a Google specific forum. If you want to argue this on the basis of whether it can be a good thing from a visitor satisfaction perspective, I won't disagree that this may be the case. However, I interpreted the question as "If I link to high PR sites, will this make me come up higher on Google SERPs than if I don't?" I see no direct evidence of that. Only way I can see this helping with Google is if the webmasters you link to notice, and based in this link to you.

BigDave

7:55 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

As far as how it might relate to Google ranking, I suspect that there is some advantage (suspect being the key word, I have no proof).

Why would I think that? Because google lives for links. They follow links, rank by links, pay attention to link text.

Since they like links so much, I would not be at all surprised if they thought higher of a site that seems to have a reasonable pattern of linking out.

Just as there is no proof that you do get a bonus for this, there is no proof that you don't. I'm going to stick with my hunch, as linking out doesn't appear to have hurt me yet.

tedster

8:19 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Here's another scenario.

You link out to a high PR site that is valuable to your users and very much on topic. That site starts seeing significant traffic from you. So they check out your site, and they like what they see. So they talk about your site somewhere in their content, rewarding you with a healthy, hearty, inline link that does not share the page with any other external link - thus passing on lots of PR.

It happened for one of my clients. And we do this ourselves from time to time, when a good site pops up on the radar as a significant referrer.

Yidaki

8:42 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>we do this ourselves from time to time, when a good site pops up on the radar as a significant referrer.

tedster, yah i see, you're talking about good webmastering, or!? Unfortunately only a few people do so. I'm feelin' somewhat old shool ... good ole days ... ;)

steve128

9:23 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

The way I see it, it cannot do no harm linking to a high PR on theme site. But it is doubtful the site providing the link will gain an advantage regards it's own rankings.

How can it? the abuse of such a system would be dead simple to manipulate

rfgdxm1

9:30 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Exactly steve128. If this was true, then this means all a webmaster has to do is add a couple links to every page, whether or not it does the site user any good, and he gets a boost in ranking. It would make no sense for Google to *encourage* artificially added links the webmaster put there just to manipulate where he comes up in the SERPs.

BigDave

9:32 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Adding links to your onw site if it boosts your ranking would be no different than putting <h1> tags on your pages. A boost to your ranking does not necessarily equate to a *big* boost to your ranking.

coconutz

9:40 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Another perspective:

It has been beneficial for us in Google. We rank well and receive a number of visitors looking for information on or related to the authorative sites we link to. This has brought our other pages a number of visitors we would have not had. We're found in the search results for a broader variety of terms related to our topic because of linking to these other sites. The anchor text and annotations are worth the minimal effort to add them to your pages.

Google is a very colorful world once you get beyond the green and white.

steve128

9:48 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

As I said it will not hurt. The notion of course has been spread by high pr sites, some fall for it hook-line-and-sinker ;-

rfgdxm1

9:55 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>As I said it will not hurt. The notion of course has been spread by high pr sites, some fall for it hook-line-and-sinker ;-

No. If there is no algo boost from doing this, adding these links will drain away PR that you could direct back to your own site. From a PR perspective, the perfect site has no external links. My guess is this notion is just, as you say, propaganda that high PR sites like to spread. ;)

jeremy goodrich

9:56 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Just keep in mind - analyze 1 variable in isolation - and you will 'miss the big picture'.

Didn't GoogleGuy say something like, worry less abuot 1 keyword, than lots of keywords, and worry less about those rankings than about sales & conversion rates?

*Any* variable, in isolation, will naturally be prone to extensive manipulation.

Think of all the affiliate marketers who hate dmoz - cause they can't get in. That link, like the link to a high PR site - are just single variables, in one big algorithm.

Opinion is one thing - bad analytical tacits, a whole nother issue.

steve128

10:02 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

"It has been beneficial for us in Google. We rank well and receive a number of visitors looking for information on or related to the authorative sites we link to"

coconutz Has it ever occured to you people land on your site because yours is the best site for a said search query?

Not because who you link too, hey think about it for a while.

If the "authoritive site" was more in-line with search query the surfer would land there, not on your site

MeditationMan

10:10 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

My guess is this notion is just, as you say, propaganda that high PR sites like to spread. ;)

A conspiracy theorist, huh? ;)

PR, as we all know, isn't everything. I can't prove it, but I suspect that linking to other relevant sites helps boost your relevance.

Looking at the sites above mine for my main keyword (I'm #7) I see that the #1 site has 10 outgoing links on his index page while the #2 site has 8 outgoing links to relevant sites, and #3 has 15. The PR drain doesn't seem to be doing those guys any harm. I emulated them by adding 8 outgoing links on my index page, and since doing that I've moved up 5 places. Maybe I should add more links and experience more PR drain if it's going to have this effect?

digitalghost

10:13 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>From a PR perspective, the perfect site has no external links

Brilliant, if every site on the web were perfect, there wouldn't be any PR to pass.

rfgdxm1

10:16 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>Opinion is one thing - bad analytical tacits, a whole nother issue.

In this case, I'd say link in such way that makes sense for your site, and the visitors. If outbound links on every page work in this context, then do it. However, don't go adding links just on the theory it might help with Google rankings. If it doesn't help the visitors, you may just end up draining PR from your site with no benefit.

buckworks

10:19 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

<<From a PR perspective, the perfect site has no external links.>>

From a PR perspective, I would define the perfect site as one that gains PR over time because other webmasters find it worth linking to, ideally without being asked!

If relevant links out add value to your content, then make the links -- over time you'll gain more PR than you give away.

[edited by: buckworks at 10:22 pm (utc) on May 23, 2003]

steve128

10:21 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

MeditationMan What is the PR of the site/s you mention, are you sure they arn't reciprical links, has the site plenty of PR to play with...etc

Have you just this update moved up the serps...If you have I would not be confident it will last

rfgdxm1

10:23 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>Brilliant, if every site on the web were perfect, there wouldn't be any PR to pass.

True. However, if somehow, someway you can slap up a site with no outbound links that tons of people will link to, it will do well. The problem, of course, is that in the real world this rarely works. Take a look at google.com. Not a whole lotta outbound links on that, yet it has massive PR and does well on searches.

I'm a serious Usenet rat. Statistically very few people post using Google Groups. Few outbound links haven't stopped Google from getting to #1 on that SERP.

coconutz

10:53 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>Not because who you link too, hey think about it for a while.

Agreed. It's more about how I link to them. If I didn't link to them I wouldn't be receiving the visitors that I do as a direct result of the anchor text and descriptions not found elsewhere on my site. So for me, there is a direct benefit (not related to that little green bar) that I wouldn't have otherwise.

steve, oops, back!

[edited by: coconutz at 11:34 pm (utc) on May 23, 2003]

telegenisys

10:56 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

please look at ciml.co.uk and the answer is apparant.

steve128

11:14 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Very apparent, a couple of PR6/5 backlinks?

And the site/page is PR5, is that unusual?

coconutz Hey I do think...oops gone

Oaf357

11:26 pm on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

Only five backlinks currently shown on Google but they are from good sites. *WINK*